Surrender or Starve

ONE Imperial Tempest

If the earth were really flat, northwestern Somalia would approximate the edge. A landscape more bleak and disorienting is hard to imagine. Not a tree looms in the distance; there are only anthills. Curtains of dust weld desert and sky into one dun-drab pigment. The clumps of short grass have a freeze-dried, glacial aspect, even though the equator is only six hundred miles to the south.

As the Land Cruiser in which I am riding moves closer to the Ethiopian border, swarms of canvas huts zoom into focus, without warning, through the swirling dirt. The vehicle halts. The lips and noses of refugees, who live in these huts, press against the windows. The expressions I see through the glass are opaque; there is a particle-like uniformity to the faces. They lack the angular, Semitic beauty and globular eyes that television viewers normally associate with the people of Ethiopia. The shreds of material on their backs are characterless synthetics; not the traditional shammas that make the Ethiopians of the famine-stricken north resemble extras in a biblical epic.

Nor were these people, whom I had come to interview, starving. They were not Auschwitz-like sacks of bones. Had they been, the skill of television cameramen could have at least endowed them with an individuality. They were only normally malnourished and suffered from the usual roll of African diseases. Not beautiful, and not starving, these people made no impression. They were just a large mass, significant only because of their numbers. Television could do nothing with them. By the sensational standards of evening news coverage in the United States, they offered no visual drama. The only thing these people had to offer were their stories.

Ethiopia, as a historical and romantic concept, is a loose and wondrous fragment of the Middle East, and this group of humanity on the Somali frontier represents the more mundane African reality that always has threatened Ethiopia’s romantic image. The late twentieth century in Ethiopia is little different than the late nineteenth. While Semitic Christian warlords in the northern highlands—today fighting as communists—battle for control of an ancient kingdom, the lowland underbelly of Ethiopia is teeming with Africanized Moslems, called Oromos. As opposed to the highland northerners, who, like the Jews and Arabs, are said to descend from Shem, the eldest of the sons of Noah, the Oromos, linguistically at least, trace their roots back to Ham, the youngest of Noah’s progeny. Although the Oromos are the most numerous of Ethiopia’s peoples, they have never really mattered, and at least until recently, they suffered less than those who did. Unlike the lives of the Amharas, Tigreans, and Eritreans of the north, the lives of the Oromos were not a continual cycle of war and drought. In fact, the Oromos of the Hararghe region, near to the border with Somalia, were relatively prosperous farmers. Joseph Stalin would have classified them as kulaks. On account of their numbers, and the food they produce, they have the capacity to support and to undermine the Ethiopian regime in the capital of Addis Ababa. To judge by his actions, Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose preeminent title is General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, evidently agrees with Stalin.

Formerly, the Oromos could be exploited, but every aspect of their daily lives could not be controlled. But now that situation has changed dramatically. Supported by the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern bloc to a degree unprecedented in Africa, the present leaders in Addis Ababa—Christian Amharas all—have invigorated Ethiopia’s age-old despotism with modern, totalitarian techniques.

Through one of these techniques, the waves of Moslems crashing against the Christian mountain fortress has now been dammed up. The process is called “villagization,” an awkward translation from Amharic that means something strikingly similar to collectivization, as originated by the Soviets after the Bolshevik Revolution. As we will later discover, the famine holocaust in Ethiopia—although resembling what transpired in Biafra in the 1960s and Cambodia in the 1970s—actually is derivative of the Stalinist experiment in the Ukraine in the 1930s, when, according to Hoover Institution scholar Robert Conquest, more people perished than had in all of World War I.

During the mid 1980s, the declared intent of the Ethiopian government was to move all the Oromos into village clusters, where Oromo labor could be better organized and the authorities more easily could provide the Oromos with essential services. Eyewitness accounts of what really happened during villagization were provided by many of the fifty thousand Oromo refugees who stampeded over the Somali border in 1986, fleeing the program’s horrors. “In my life I never saw drought,” exclaimed Zahara Dawit Kore, a mother of two children. “It’s not from drought that we ran; we ran because of the soldiers. …They made us bare-handed,” she told me during an interview I conducted in late October 1986. What the soldiers did to these Oromos was apparently terrible enough to spark an exodus to northwestern Somalia.

All the eyewitness accounts were basically the same; all the Oromos apparently were brutalized in a similar way. Sexual violation and religious persecution were the tools used to destroy local village culture. But listen closely and long enough—several hours for each refugee—and one discovers that despite the shared experience, each man and woman suffered in a particular way. Each account had its own characteristics. Tens of thousands of Oromos, perhaps more, suffered, but each differently.

Fatma Abdullah Ahmed, the mother of four children, had buck teeth. The top of her head was covered with a cheap orange shawl, and in her hand she held a string of prayer beads. The trouble for Mrs. Ahmed began in late 1984, when U.S. citizens began a massive outpouring of aid to famine victims in another part of Ethiopia, in response to dramatic television pictures and pleas for help from the Mengistu government. Flies buzzed around Mrs. Ahmed’s lips as she spoke.

Mrs. Ahmed’s new home was a tent in the Oromo refugee camp of Tug Wajale B, which was due west of the Somali town of Hargeisa and five miles from the Ethiopian border. At the end of 1986, the camp was a breeding ground for scurvy, hepatitis, relapsing fever, tuberculosis, cholera, pneumonia, diarrhea, and conjunctivitis. Only malaria, usually the most common illness in black Africa, was surprisingly rare. International relief officials were embarrassed about the sanitation situation at the camp. The smell of ordure was all around; wherever one looked, people were defecating. But the refugees at Tug Wajale B complained less than had those at better equipped camps I visited. Indeed, explained Halima Muhumed Abdi, another mother of four, “all this is nothing compared to the disaster that we’ve suffered.”

The 50,000 Oromo refugees were among the three million “villagized,” according to the Ethiopian government’s own reckoning. But the collectivization of the Oromos never registered on the U.S. consciousness. Although the major U.S. newspapers all published at least one article about the Oromos’s situation, the people at Tug Wajale B never made the news on any of the three major networks in the United States. Not only didn’t Tug Wajale have good visual possibilities for television, but its story unfolded too late, occurring in 1986, after the famine had peaked and interest in the Oromos’s situation had gone into remission. The few U.S. journalists who did make the journey to the Somali-Ethiopian border tended to emphasize the awful conditions of the camp, rather than what had driven the refugees there in the first place.

The U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa was roused into action not by anything the media uncovered, but as a result of interviews with the refugees, conducted several months before I visited Tug Wajale, by Jason W. Clay, the research director of Cultural Survival, an independent human rights organization based at Harvard University. The embassy investigated the matter of human rights violation against the Oromos to the greatest degree possible, given the restrictive conditions in a country that, more than any other in Africa, approximated the Soviet model. The investigation drew a blank; it could neither confirm nor confute the refugees’ horror stories. “We will never really know the truth about villagization,” the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), M. Peter McPherson, admitted to me. The issue died before it was ever raised, lost in a heap of other cruelties for which the West had no independent confirmation.

In the final analysis, the accounts given by the refugees made little impact. The road to the edge of the earth never became well trodden. Eventually, many of the Oromos were moved out of Tug Wajale and dispersed to other camps strung out along the Ethiopian border. Sand covered their tracks.

“There is an air of nightmarish fantasy about affairs in Ethiopia,” wrote Alan Moorehead in The Blue Nile, referring to events of the late eighteenth century. But as the refugees’ stories indicate, the “medieval melodrama” has been heightened by a chilling, twentieth-century thoroughness and precision. Progress, as so often happens, has been inverted by ideology; the passions that stir the rulers of present-day Ethiopia are perhaps even more difficult for a middle class, Western mind to grasp than those of tyrants from previous epochs. It is doubtful whether the U.S. public understands Ethiopia, Sudan, or the rest of Africa much better now than it did before the famine emergency started in October 1984. Beginning then and continuing through the middle of 1985, the public was bombarded with images of people starving in an exotic land, images that gripped viewers by the throat and elicited a more emotional audience response than had occurred in relation to any other foreign news story of recent years. The result was that U.S. citizens and their government flooded Ethiopia and neighboring Sudan with aid, the procurement, use, and misuse of which provided the media with most of their story. It was, in short, a U.S. story, about U.S. involvement in Africa.

But that was only the external side of the drama. The internal dimension—famine as a manipulated consequence of war and ethnic strife—was passed over. Newspapers and television left unwritten and unfilmed what both media initially were designed to capture: history in the making. A country in Africa, the first to do so, was in the long, bloody process of converting to communism— as completely as had Cuba and Vietnam. The architects of this transformation, as we shall discover, were encountering stiff resistance from guerrillas who were better trained and inflicted more damage in bigger battles than did similar groups in southern Africa and Central America. This was not, in the parlance of old Africa hands, just another “bongo war.” The technical and organizational abilities of the combatants, who were beneficiaries of the only culture in black Africa with a written language that went back two thousand years, resulted in masterfully fought, albeit ignored, set-piece battles involving tanks and fighter jets. War and the mass population movements it engendered were the main features of the Ethiopian landscape. Ethiopia was reenacting the experience of Soviet Russia in the years following the overthrow of the czar, when the new communist rulers battled a host of rebel armies in order to maintain a reactionary nineteenth-century empire. Famine, as in USSR, was a partial consequence of this historic struggle. But almost none of this got through to the U.S. audience. The media were more interested in the politics of relief agencies than in the politics of Ethiopia.

The U.S. public was left only with images: of charming, suffering people, whose awesome physical beauty was being graphically savaged by what appeared to be an act of God. Drought, according to those first, memorable media reports, was the villain, and if anyone was to blame, it was the overfed West. Predictably, the Reagan administration caught more flak in the early stages of the emergency than did Ethiopia’s own government. Giving food, for individual U.S. citizens as well as for the administration, thus became a convenient means to expunge guilt. As the weeks wore on, however, the media began to paint a more complicated picture. Famine, it emerged, was not just an act of God, but an act of humans too. As more and more revelations came out about Ethiopian government misconduct, the U.S. public began to feel cheated; its penitent offerings of food were not really all that was required. By this time, however, the story was slipping away. The novelty value was gone. Other people and events were crowding in and competing for the sympathy and understanding of the U.S. television audience: hostages taken from a TWA plane in Beirut, blacks fighting for their freedom in South Africa, Nicaraguans reeling from the blows of repression and civil war. Just as the famine emergency was changing gears—moving from a charity issue to a deeply political issue—it began to fade. A fog of bewilderment remained.

The images on the television screen shocked, but they didn’t clarify. For all their horror, the images did not reveal to the U.S. public the intrigues and bloody conquests that were behind this suffering. Nor did the images reveal themselves as the result of Marxism and Amhara misanthropy. (Donald L. Levine, in his landmark study of Ethiopian culture, Wax and Gold, wrote that the Amhara “suffers from no illusions about homo sapiens at his best—unless they are dark illusions. …The generic word for ‘man’ in Amharic, saw, is the subject of a number of negative associations. …One may say that the Amhara’s view of human nature is dominated by his perception of man’s inherent aggressiveness and unworthiness.”) Thus, the U.S. public, sitting in front of television screens, was ignorant of the world from which the strange and disturbing images had sprung.

The Oromos stranded on the Somali plateau were but a symptom of their times. In the mid 1980s, Ethiopia evoked a scene out of Boris Pasternak; millions were displaced, often caught between rival armies, and on the move. They crossed a landscape of jagged mountain peaks and flaming sulfur deserts. In the extreme north, more than 150,000 Ethiopian army troops were battling 35,000 Eritrean guerrillas in a war that has witnessed the largest infusion of Soviet arms in all of Africa and—a few other cases aside—all of the Third World. In the neighboring province of Tigre, 15,000 self-declared Marxist rebels were fighting an insurgency against the government, which responded by burning crops and bombing village markets from the air. Other, smaller rebel outfits in Gondar, Wollo, and elsewhere also were tearing away at Mengistu’s army. According to Western diplomats, as quoted in a January 6, 1985, article in The New York Times by correspondent Clifford D. May, approximately twenty-five rebel organizations were active in Ethiopia. As a means to clear strategic swaths of the northern countryside of supposedly hostile concentrations of civilians, hundreds of thousands of highlanders were resettled in mosquito-infested swamps of the jungly southwest, where these highlanders were placed under the brutal supervision of Marxist cadres. Rather than risk being taken for resettlement at government feeding centers, hundreds of thousands of other famine-stricken people, mostly Tigreans, trekked westward for weeks on foot to refugee camps inside the Sudanese border. In southern Ethiopia, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) was active, which was one of several, obvious motives the government had for villagizing the Oromos. The 50,000 Oromos in Somalia were a fragment of that particular convulsion.

Ethiopia, when the U.S. television audience discovered it in late October 1984, was not so much a country as an empire in the throes of dismemberment. It had startling similarities with contemporary El Salvador and Afghanistan, not to mention Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the Soviet Union under V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, this age-old Christian-dominated state on the Horn of Africa had its own, grim method of dealing with its subjects: “surrender or starve.”

The spectacle of blood and starvation—a spectacle that is unprecedented, even by the inhuman standards of Ethiopia’s own past— continues to present the United States with one of its most compelling foreign policy challenges in the Third World since the start of the Cold War. Yet U.S. policy toward Ethiopia—massive grain deliveries notwithstanding—is as calcified as ever. The nationalist aspirations of the Eritreans are ignored, even though this is an underlying cause of hunger in the north of the country. The media, despite a surfeit of famine coverage, much of it repetitive, rarely reported in depth on official U.S. attitudes toward the nationalist aspirations of the Eritreans and other insurgent groups.

A hungry child may know no politics, as the U.S. government slogan proclaims, but politics—in Ethiopia and in the world at large—is really why that child is hungry. Every day, the gap widens between the number of people in Ethiopia and the amount of food produced there. Experts foresee a much greater famine in the 1990s. Aid is simply not effective in the face of regimes that do not have to ensure the well-being of their subjects in order to stay in power.

Less proximate than Nicaragua, less crucial than Iran (although just as populous), Ethiopia still remains one of the few big pieces that the USSR has managed to knock off the U.S. side of the board. Located at the entrance to the Red Sea through which more and more of the free world’s oil must pass, Ethiopia is truly strategic. Like Nicaragua and Iran, Ethiopia was lost while Jimmy Carter was president. The Carter State Department counseled restraint. After all, Moscow’s clumsy and brazen gambit to grab Ethiopia was certain to fail; unlike Iran, Ethiopia’s revolution was not anti-U.S. The Ethiopians, who never had been colonized, had a habit of ejecting foreigners and surely would want to do so again, so the logic of the liberals went. In a sense, they were right: Soviet influence is universally despised by the Ethiopian people. But even more so than in other places in the Third World, Ethiopia is a thugocracy: thugs run it, and only what they think and feel counts. The Soviets, therefore, were not ejected. To ever believe that they would have been was incredibly naïve.

Thugs get overthrown in Africa. Ethiopia, however, is different. Here the Soviets have implanted not only their influence, but their entire system and security apparatus as well. In the midst of the famine, with the media preoccupied with relief politics, Ethiopia converted its “provisional military” government to a “socialist democracy.” Socialist democracies are less easily dismantled. Cuba and Vietnam prove the point.

With grain alone, “you’re not going to charm a Stalinist oriented government out of its dependence on the Soviet Union,” the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker, said to me. Although the Reagan administration was more realistic about Ethiopia than was the Carter administration, the former did precious little with its realism. If ever a Third World country were a candidate for the Reagan Doctrine, it was Ethiopia.

But Ethiopian politics plays to an empty house in the United States. There is no personality to capture the crowd’s attention. Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam has proved himself to be more ruthless and more cunning than either Muammar Gaddafi or Ayatollah Khomeini. By the standards of several human rights reports, Mengistu is the world’s cruelest leader. But like many communist rulers, he is a faceless bureaucrat. The vast majority of the U.S. populace wouldn’t even recognize him.

Mengistu had a predecessor whose face was known throughout the world—Haile Selassie. To many, Ethiopia—a Greek word meaning the land of the “burned faces”—still brings to mind that other image in addition to the one of the starving child: Haile Selassie, the little dark man with the beard, as small as he was larger than life. To understand the world of the starving child, one must first flesh out the quaint image of the storybook emperor.

He is like some figure out of a dream. Clad in a cape and pith helmet, or bedecked with medals, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Negus Negusti (King of Kings), Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, appears in our minds in a series of flashes, each only a few seconds long, separated not only by years but also by decades. On June 30, 1936, at the League of Nations in Geneva, he wore a black cape over a white tunic and pleaded from the rostrum for help against Benito Mussolini, whose fascist Italian army had invaded the primitive land of Ethiopia with tanks and poison gas. No help ever came. Henceforth, the emperor always would be enshrouded in sympathy, part of the West’s guilty conscience, the face of a people whom the democracies had failed. In January 1941, he is back again. This time the face is half buried under an oversized pith helmet, the beard jutting out from beneath, more prominent than ever. The emperor has crossed the border from Sudan to regain his kingdom; here he is quixotic, yet on the verge of real triumph. At his side, increasing the aura of romance, is Orde Wingate, the British major and savant of the Old Testament. Wingate is himself a man of near-legend, who later will die in the jungles of Burma fighting the Japanese, but not before he has trained the Jewish army in Palestine, giving Moshe Dayan his most valuable lessons in the art of warfare. Finally, there is November 25, 1963, the first memory I and many of my generation have of Haile Selassie. President John Kennedy’s coffin is passing through the streets of Washington, D.C., and dignitaries from around the world are escorting the caisson. The emperor, in full military regalia, is there. He marches near Charles de Gaulle, the tallness of one highlighting the shortness of the other. What a sight! So small and seemingly vulnerable, yet so proud and full of authority. Millions of Americans, glued to their television sets that weekend, always will remember the marching emperor. Haile Selassie signified not only a distant, fairy-tale kingdom, but the very world beyond the United States and Europe in all its diversity. Had the turbaned wise men from the East come to pay homage to the dead young president, it would have been only slightly more impressive.

The truth about Haile Selassie is that, like the little, medal-bedecked man on the television screen, he really was an emperor, and like any absolute monarch, he required a large dose of cruelty to keep his throne and the empire that went with it. The images on television and in the newsreels didn’t lie. The deception was the viewer’s. The U.S. public was so dazzled with the spectacle that no one thought to look beyond it, or even closely at it. Why bother? After all, he was pro-U.S. He was seeking to modernize his country. Ethiopia was so far away that it barely seemed real. Haile Selassie’s last appearance in our collective memories was almost a quarter century ago. Communications satellites didn’t yet exist. Whatever sins the emperor did commit were years away from being effectively brought into Western living rooms.

The official U.S. attitude toward Ethiopia was similarly indulgent. The emperor welcomed the United States, granting permission for a military communications complex near Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, so naturally the United States supported him. The evils of his rule certainly were well known to U.S. policymakers, and generous economic aid from Washington was designed to mitigate the suffering of the Ethiopian masses. But beyond that, U.S. officials, as with most everybody else, preferred not to criticize. Pushing for reform would have been like tinkering with the divine order. We all stood in awe of Haile Selassie. C. L. Sulzberger, chief foreign correspondent of The New York Times, related in his memoirs that he bowed three times when meeting the emperor in 1952. Unlike other African leaders, Haile Selassie was not looked down on by Westerners, either in cultural or racial terms.

As strange and primitive as Ethiopia was, it had a distinctly Middle Eastern flavor, with vague bridges to the West. Although the faces of the people were black, their sharp features were not altogether African. The emperor claimed descent from the Hebrew King Solomon and the Yemeni Queen of Sheba, and like the old imam of Yemen, the emperor kept lions as pets. Ethiopian names had a Hebraic ring, and there were a significant number of Jews, known disparagingly as falashas (strangers), among the northern rural population. The Christian religion of Ethiopia, like the written language, went back to antiquity and was heavily grounded in the Pentateuch. During the five-year Italian occupation of Addis Ababa (1936–1941), several members of the royal family spent their exile in Jerusalem. There was a biblical dimension to Ethiopia that not even modern Israel could claim. Ethiopia’s roots as an empire were deep and reached back to Roman times when it was forged by tribespeople from southern Arabia. Ethiopia was not some artificially created African state, whose boundaries had been drawn up on the spur of the moment by a group of European powers. The emperor had been in a position of power since 1916. Coup watching was not a pastime of the diplomatic circuit in Addis Ababa the way it was elsewhere on the continent.

Blinded by the armor of tradition, few noticed that the portrait of power was flawed, and that cracks were opening up on the canvas. The noble bearing and the stern, impassive gaze were not a result of high birth, but of race. Haile Selassie was an Amhara. Rich or poor to the point of starving, Amharas see themselves as born to the purple: millions have the emperor’s piercing eyes. “Being an Amhara is… belonging to a superior category of human beings. This is not simple ethnocentrism; it reflects rather a basically aristocratic orientation,” wrote Levine in Wax and Gold. Amharas account for only about one-fourth of Ethiopia’s 42 million people, yet have imposed their rule over the whole population. To the world, Haile Selassie represented Ethiopia. But to the large majority of Ethiopians, Haile Selassie was an Amhara imperialist, with no more, nor less, popular legitimacy than that given to the British viceroy in India during the last phase of the Raj. The borders of this Amhara empire had been drawn in the late nineteenth century by Haile Selassie’s predecessor, Emperor Menelik II, whose armies swept out of their home province of Shoa to subjugate the more populous Oromo kingdoms in the south and southeast. In the north, Menelik stopped the advance of the Italian army—the best-equipped colonial force in Africa—which had marched out of Eritrea to conquer all Ethiopia. The Battle of Adowa, which took place on a Sunday, March 1, 1896, marked the first time that an African army ever had defeated a European one. The empire that Menelik bequeathed to his descendants—modern-day Ethiopia—was larger than Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined.

Along with the Thais, the North Yemenis, and the Afghans, the Ethiopian Amharas never have been truly colonized. Their national institutions and cultural patterns have been subverted only twice—by the Italian fascists, from 1936 till 1941, and by the Soviet communists, from the late 1970s until the present.

Ethiopians who are not Amharas, especially Eritreans, interpret this history differently. In a sense, not only were the Italians defeated at Adowa in 1896, but the Eritreans were, too. Eritreans made up a significant part of Italy’s sixteen-thousand-troop invasion force, and one thousand Eritreans were taken prisoner by Menelik, who ordered that their right hands and left feet be cut off. For Menelik, the Eritreans were traitors. For the Eritreans, Menelik was a colonialist, more dangerous than the Italians because he was on Eritrea’s border. Almost forty years later, when another Italian army, a fascist one, advanced into Ethiopia, scimitar-wielding Eritrean irregulars were in the front lines; the world may have sympathized with Haile Selassie against Mussolini, but much of Ethiopia’s own population did not. The 1935 Italian invasion, coming as it did during the rise of fascism in Europe and as a prelude to World War II, is remembered for the sickening newsreel images of a white European army, equipped with the most lethal modern weaponry, brutalizing a primitive black African nation. But the images were partly false. Many of the white soldiers not shown on the screen were black; they were Eritreans and others for whom the Amharas of Haile Selassie were the true enemy.

Likewise, the emperor’s triumphant return from exile in 1941, which was applauded by the Allies, sparked fear and bitterness in much of his own country. As historian Anthony Mockler related in Haile Selassie’s War: The Italian-Ethiopian Campaign, 1935–1941, the British actually debated whether it was wise to let the emperor return at all. According to Mockler, the Foreign Office in London “always questioned the wisdom of restoring Haile Selassie” to the throne because many in Ethiopia “wished to be free of Amhara rule” and might not rally around the emperor to throw out Mussolini’s forces. Haile Selassie’s eventual role in the liberation was as a figurehead really; British officers planned and led the assault on the Italian army in Ethiopia. In Mockler’s book, there is a photograph of Selassie and Wingate hunched over a map “in a symbolically accurate pose—with Orde Wingate laying down the law… and Haile Selassie looking neat and impressive.”

Once he was back on the throne after the war, the emperor tried moving the clock forward and backward at the same time. The country was opened to foreign investment, and thousands of students were sent abroad for an education. But the style of rule remained anchored in another era. When the students returned, armed with new ideas and insights from their stays in the United States and Europe, they didn’t like what they saw. One of them, Germame Neway, a graduate of Columbia University in New York City, influenced his brother in the imperial bodyguard to attempt a coup on December 14, 1960. The coup failed, but the grumbling, especially among the students, no longer could be suppressed, and a decade of protest set in.

In late 1961, Eritrea rose in revolt. By the time Haile Selassie came to Washington in 1963 to pay his respects to a slain U.S. president, he was a monarch at war, whose power was in steep decline. On the day that President Kennedy was buried, the majestic figure of the marching emperor was more appropriate to the United States than to Ethiopia.

Haile Selassie’s psychological isolation from the forces of upheaval gathering outside the palace was documented by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in The Emperor. Critics saw The Emperor, which was first published in 1978 and was loaded with the piercing irony common to the best dissident writing, as an allegory for the situation in Kapuscinski’s native Poland prior to the eruption of the Solidarity trade union movement. An Eastern European writer was at an advantage in Ethiopia during the 1970s: the revolutionary process that toppled and killed Haile Selassie was a story more familiar to a Pole or a Russian than to an African. Kapuscinski was able to paint a portrait of an emperor who was not simply at war with one segment of the population but was a monarch at war with reality.

The story began with the 1973–1974 famine in Tigre and Wollo. Except for its severity—an estimated 200,000 peasants starved to death—there was little that was unusual about this famine. Like the five previous ones that had devastated Ethiopia since Haile Selassie assumed power in 1916, this famine took place in the north; an area that the Amhara emperor had a strategic interest in keeping underdeveloped, on account of Amhara historical conflicts with the Eritreans and Tigreans. A feudal landowning system, an absence of investment, crippling taxation, and drought were the causes of the famine. As far as the palace was concerned, there was nothing to be alarmed about. According to Kapuscinski,

In late 1973 there was one difference, however. Between the 1960s famine and the one in the 1970s, television coverage of overseas events finally had come into its own—encouraged no doubt by the intervening Vietnam War. British reporter Jonathan Dimbleby’s film on the famine, The Unknown Famine, of course was not broadcast in Ethiopia, but information about the film filtered back to radicals in Addis Ababa, thereby fostering a strong empathy on their part for the starving peasants up north. A similar bond had eluded Russian revolutionaries until the beginning of this century. In Poland, the convergence of workers and intellectuals into one movement was crucial to Solidarity’s initial success. But in Africa, where radicals tend to come from an urban elite that knows, cares, and thinks little about the countryside and the peasants in it, such a development is unusual.

As news of the famine, conveyed by other journalists who followed Dimbleby’s trail, reached the streets and campus in Addis Ababa, it had the same effect as the 1905 shooting of marching workers in front of the Winter Palace had on Czar Nicholas II—the news broke the emperor’s spell. The edifice of legitimacy, erected by history and tradition, was smashed. What followed was a series of events as drawn out, bloody, and intellectually insane as the Russian and French revolutions, but even more complex. Scholar Bertram D. Wolfe’s depiction of revolutionaries in Russia in Three Who Made a Revolution could easily apply to Ethiopia: “With fiercer passion than ever, they fell to engaging in controversies of a minuteness, stubbornness, sweep, and fury unheard of in all the history of politics.”

The first phase of the uprising in Ethiopia was known as the “creeping coup.” At the beginning of 1974, taxi drivers in Addis Ababa, protesting a rise in gasoline prices, when out on strike. A general strike of all workers followed in March. At the same time, an army mutiny, sparked by a government defeat in Eritrea, was taking place. In Negelle, in the far south of Ethiopia, junior officers arrested their superiors, forcing the generals to eat the same miserable food and dirty water as did the enlisted men. Out of this and other barracks’ rebellions came the Dergue (Amharic for committee), a coordinating body of educated junior officers, with representatives from units throughout the country. The uprising began as a class struggle. But, as pointed out by Marina and David Ottaway in Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution, the ethnic animosities basic to an empire of great diversity quickly became dominant. Almost as soon as it was formed, the Dergue began to fissure along ethnic lines. Because his ancestry was not wholly Amhara, Mengistu’s rise to power was aided by his ability to be seen as a unifying figure.

It was a gradual process. The portrait of one ruler, as so often happens in the Third World, was not abruptly taken down one day from the wall and replaced with that of another. It was as if the picture imperceptibly changed, day by day, a line at a time, during a period of months, until the face of Emperor Haile Selassie was completely wiped out and the face of Mengistu Haile Mariam had emerged from out of the dim background, anonymous and impenetrable; the face of the masses at their most brutal. In the void opened by the absence of democratic institutions and the chaos of revolution, the worst national traits came to the surface.

Mengistu’s origin is obscure. By one account, he is the son of a night watchman and a palace servant; by another, the illegitimate descendant of a nobleman and his mistress. Mengistu’s complexion is extremely dark, and he is assumed to be part Oromo. During the first years of his rule, his official portrait was touched up to lighten his complexion, so he would appear like an Amhara.

In 1974, Mengistu was a thirty-two-year-old army captain, a graduate of the Holeta Military Academy, which was an institution of no prestige designed for prospective officers whose family backgrounds were neither wealthy nor aristocratic. Like Haile Selassie, Mengistu was short: five feet, five inches. But his reputation was always that of a roughneck; he was constantly getting into fist fights. For eight long years, until the outbreak of the “creeping coup,” Mengistu sat behind a desk in a cramped, dusty office in Harar, while serving as an ordnance officer for the Third Army Division—a typical dead-end job. From this vantage point, noted Rene Lefort in Ethiopie: Revolution Heretique, Mengistu learned how to master the system at its most vicious, petty, and bureaucratic level. Favors, payoffs, and other dirty business regularly crossed his desk. The future author of resettlement and villagization followed Stalin’s dictum well: “Paper will put up with anything that is written on it.”

The barracks disturbances in early 1974 were perfect opportunities for Mengistu’s cunning and thuggishness. Only a true “desperado” could challenge an absolute monarch in a society as violent and secretive as Ethiopia’s. At the Dergue’s founding meeting in late June 1974, Mengistu was chosen immediately as one of its leaders.

The emperor tried to meet the mutineers’ challenge by appointing a new prime minister, who was given a mandate for reform. Meanwhile, Mengistu and the other members of the Dergue worked behind the scenes to unite the faction-ridden armed forces. Haile Selassie was deposed on September 12, 1974; he was driven away from the palace in the back seat of a green Volkswagen and taken to the basement of the Fourth Division headquarters. Two months later, in November, a dispute about the conduct of the war in Eritrea led Mengistu to eliminate his chief rival, General Aman Michael Andom, who was gunned down in his home (see Chapter 2 for details).

In December, students were dispatched to the countryside, ostensibly to revolutionize the masses. But the relocation of the students, many of whom were members of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary party (EPRP), allowed the Dergue to consolidate its power in the cities by forming its own left-wing party, the AllEthiopian Socialist Movement, known by its Amharic acronym, MEISON. The Dergue then set MEISON against the EPRP.

On August 28, 1975, the English-language Ethiopian Herald announced that Haile Selassie had died the day before of circulatory failure. However, Mengistu is said to have suffocated the eighty-three-year-old deposed emperor with a pillow.

A few weeks later, the Dergue shot contingents of EPRP marchers down in the street. This, as Mengistu no doubt expected, only whetted MEISON’s appetite. By early 1976, MEISON cadres were conducting house-to-house searches, killing anyone suspected of belonging to the EPRP.

Within the Dergue, Mengistu continued apace to eliminate rivals. In July 1976, the members of a faction that supported a peaceful solution to the war in Eritrea all were executed. Undeterred, another group, led by General Teferi Banti—this time calling for democratic reforms—demanded that Mengistu’s power be circumscribed. Mengistu, uncharacteristically, submitted. A few months went by. Then, on February 2, 1977, General Banti and his colleagues were murdered by Mengistu inside the palace. By now, having destroyed the EPRP with the help of MEISON, the Dergue was turning against MEISON itself.

The Russians were very impressed with Mengistu’s performance thus far, and a group of East German security police were dispatched to Addis Ababa to advise the emergent Ethiopian leader on what to do next. What followed was the Red Terror, which began in May 1977. On May Day eve, soldiers that had been brought into town by convoy machine-gunned to death hundreds of demonstrating students, including many children. During the coming months, dozens of new bodies would turn up on the street every morning; most of them were teenagers who were vaguely connected with revolutionary politics at a time when there was no right side to be on. The victims’ families had to pay a fee to the government in order to get the bodies back for burial.

The revolution ground to a halt the next year. The death toll was estimated to be thirty thousand, not including tens of thousands of battlefield deaths. (In Tigre, an insurgency had broken out against the new military rulers, and in Eritrea, Mengistu’s uncompromising stance toward the guerrillas resulted in intensified fighting.) Of the 120 members of the original Dergue, only a small fraction were still alive. Compared to the hundreds of political prisoners in jail in Haile Selassie’s day, tens of thousands were being held in 1978. Torture reportedly was widespread.

The Darwinian process of revolution had proved efficient and had elevated Mengistu in a very short time from the very bottom to the very top, where he both orchestrated and survived four years of the most violent internecine struggles imaginable. Constantly underestimated by his rivals, he never once miscalculated. The standard of treachery he was judged by, given the paranoia engendered by the revolution, was much higher than that ever applied to Haile Selassie. A Marxist revolution once again had brought an outdated despotism up to a modern standard, with a programmed killer installed in the emperor’s palace.

Mengistu belonged to the most lethal class of dictator: the kind not distracted by greed. As with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, Mengistu was not personally corrupt, and corruption never has been a key element in his style of rule. Apologists for the Ethiopian regime—and in Europe, especially, there are many—point out that it is more honest and efficient than the previous one. This is certainly true. Mengistu has none of the all-too-human foibles of other Third World rulers, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, for example, whose evil was of a lesser variety, one to which the U.S. public could relate. (Is there a more tangible symbol of conspicuous, nouveau riche, middle-class consumption than Mrs. Marcos’s fetish for shoes?) This is one reason why even during the height of the famine, the media never bothered much with Mengistu. As a personality he was too austere and his evil too remote for mass audience appeal.

Whatever his bloodlines, Mengistu had the ascetic discipline required to keep an empire, torn by several wars, from splitting apart. He has proven to be a more aggressive imperialist than Haile Selassie was, and in this endeavor, the USSR has been a better ally for Mengistu than the United States was for the emperor. Massive Soviet arms shipments turned the tide against guerrillas in Eritrea and the Somali army in the Ogaden desert. In the densely populated Ethiopian countryside, Marxism was more efficient than feudalism in controlling the lives and movements of the peasants, not all of whom were loyal to the regime or to the Amhara cause. In place of landlords, whose interests were similar, but not always identical, to those of the emperor, the government has been able to rule more efficiently through its own peasant associations. Eastern bloc advisers influenced the 1979 proclamation on collectivization; the proclamation put additional emphasis on state farms, which were (and are) useful as bases and listening posts for the government because they were not manned by local people. Between 1977 and 1984, state farms expanded threefold in area. Even though production on state farms continued to fall, government plans called for doubling of the state farm sector according to Allen Hoben in the January 21, 1985, issue of The New Republic.

Hoben wrote that “to extend its economic control over agriculture, the government has reimposed taxation, established a government marketing agency, fixed prices, experimented with production quotas imposed on peasant associations, and interfered increasingly with private grain trade. Not surprisingly, these measures have reduced the peasants’ incentives to produce.”

Correspondent Paul Vallely described this policy in progress in an article entitled “How Mengistu Hammers the Peasants” in the March 1, 1985, issue of The Times of London.

The effects of this policy were made clear to Clifford D. May, who observed in the December 1, 1985, issue of The New York Times Magazine that while famine ravaged the north of Ethiopia, in the central province of Shoa outside Addis Ababa, grain was going unpicked because farmers didn’t want to sell at the official price. But these facts never have been taken into account by the Ethiopian authorities. At the end of the last decade, although every available statistic pointed to the failure of made-in-Moscow agricultural philosophy, the regime pushed ahead with Soviet-modeled policy and went one step further by beginning the resettlement of peasants from the north to the south against their will. In the eyes of the Dergue, incontrovertible data are mere obstacles to be overcome by the force of ideology. While production suffers, a rural power base is built. (Even in the campaign to increase literacy—one of the regime’s few undeniable success stories—extending the central government’s control over the peasants is a principle theme. Amharic is the language of instruction throughout the country, and the textbooks are a vehicle for Marxist indoctrination.)

In the early 1980s, disastrous agricultural policies, drought, and two major government offensives against guerrillas in Eritrea and Tigre—which devastated the land, the peasant farmers who worked it, and the livestock—resulted in the worst famine since the 1932–1933 famine in the Ukraine. As in the Ukraine, untried, theoretical principles of collectivized agriculture were inflicted on a peasantry burdened by centuries of feudalism, which had been the target of government–inspired ethnic discrimination.

While hundreds of thousands began to die in the northern provinces of Gondar, Wollo, Tigre, and Eritrea, the Dergue spent an estimated $200 million in September 1984 on celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the revolution. The event was supervised by North Koreans, and dignitaries from all over the Eastern bloc attended. By then, Mengistu was in all but name the new emperor—one of the strongest in the two-thousand-year-long history of the empire. Time chief of correspondents Henry Muller and the magazine’s Nairobi bureau chief, James Wilde, were perhaps the only U.S. journalists to have ever interviewed the Ethiopian leader. They described their summer 1986 interview in an article in Time (August 4, 1986).

After the tenth anniversary celebrations, the magnitude of the famine finally forced itself on the Dergue’s attention. Western television crews were allowed into the country. The Western public’s response was dramatic: a Soviet ally was not going to be undermined by a famine the way a U.S. ally was a decade before. U.S. congressmen rushed to Addis Ababa to meet with Ethiopian government officials and to see what could be done to alleviate the suffering. Christopher J. Matthews, an administrative assistant to the U.S. Speaker of the House, was part of a congressional delegation that met with Mengistu. According to Matthews in an article that appeared in The New Republic (January 21, 1985), the Ethiopian leader described the famine thus: “The death toll in human and animal lives is really astounding. …Hardest hit in the human bracket are children and senior citizens.”

At least the Dergue was keeping count. During the famine in the Ukraine, according to scholar Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow, the Kremlin kept figures for livestock mortality, but not for human mortality.

The Dergue’s own Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) had turned its attention to the famine much earlier. (The RRC was another of the handful of solid achievements for which the regime properly received credit.) Mindful of the role the 1973–1974 famine played in toppling the emperor, the Dergue created the RRC soon after the revolution to serve as a separate, governmental authority for dealing with food shortages and related matters. For years, the RRC had been predicting terrible consequences if more help from the West was not forthcoming, and in the RRC’s annual aid request issued on March 30, 1984—seven months before television footage from the relief camp at Korem finally galvanized Western governments into action—the commission stated with impressive accuracy the extent of the emerging famine.

The Reagan administration was universally criticized for not responding to these prescient cries for help sooner. After an RRC plea in October 1982, only 8,000 tons of grain were pledged by Washington, compared with 400,000 given in the first six months after the October 1984 plea, when President Reagan was under intense public pressure to do more. It goes without saying that had the administration been more generous in 1982 and in the year following, more lives would have been saved, and in a perfect world, the harsh judgments rendered against the administration would have been fully justified. But to argue, as many have, that President Reagan was prepared to let Ethiopian children die because their government was communist is to miss the point. Had the Dergue, in 1982 and 1983, evinced even the slightest inclination toward flexibility in its agricultural policies, the U.S. government and other donors might have been more compassionate. Stalinist economics and the two largest government offensives against the Eritrean and Tigrean guerrillas in the history of the war were dooming northern Ethiopia to be forever on the brink of famine. The United States obviously did not want to get into the position of subsidizing a regime that was burning crops and dropping cluster bombs in the drought zone with one hand and using its relief agency to beg with the other.

This fear was borne out by subsequent events. Even the deaths of as many as one million peasants in the 1984–1985 famine did not cause the Dergue to alter its policies in the slightest. In fact, the famine appeared only to stiffen the regime’s resolve. The resettlement of Tigreans and the villagization of Oromos were accelerated, and a July 1985 offensive against guerrillas in Eritrea resulted in the heaviest fighting there of the decade. Consequently, although the drought had ended by mid 1985, the structural food deficit kept growing, according to USAID. With production stagnated, the grain shortfall in 1990 in Ethiopia is expected to be 2.5 million tons, compared with a 1.7 million ton shortfall during the height of the famine. USAID, fed up with the state of affairs in Addis Ababa, phased down its Ethiopia operation in 1986, leaving only one, small feeding program of 20,000 tons in place. The decision was greeted without a murmur of protest from the U.S. public—which already had lost interest in the issue—or from liberal Democrats, such as Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who had tired of extending the olive branch to a regime that refused to learn from experience. The formation of a full-fledged, ruling communist party (the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia), the regime’s conversion to a “socialist democracy,” its continued appetite for war, and a failure to countenance any economic reforms even in the wake of a famine only seemed to vindicate the administration’s consistently negative attitude toward the Dergue. USAID administrator M. Peter McPherson—President Reagan’s special adviser on the famine emergency—remarked to me that Mengistu’s refusal to ever meet with McPherson was like “a badge of honor.”

Not only was the Ethiopian government’s policy a disincentive to aid, but so was the government’s public attitude toward the donors. In A Year in the Death of Africa, author Peter Gill accused the RRC commissioner, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, of “a directness of manner that bordered on rudeness.” Gill, a British television reporter whose book was devoted to aid agency politics in 1984, wrote that Dawit “produced an unnerving moral equation between rich Governments in the West and the miserable poor in his own country. It was a formula that seemed at times to exclude his own government from further obligation.”

Dawit’s superiors in the Dergue appeared even more impervious to his warnings of impending disaster than did the Western governments he always was ready to criticize. The louder the RRC’s cries for help got, the more preoccupied the Dergue became with the war, the formation of the party, and the coming anniversary celebrations. How were Western governments supposed to get worked up about what the RRC was saying if the RRC’s own bosses weren’t?

Originally, the RRC might have been created with the intention of forestalling future famines. But by 1984, the RRC had become a mere vestige of the emperor’s powerless westernized elite, given the task of collecting relief donations for a regime that spent half its budget on fighting wars in collaboration with the Soviet Union. The famine was good business for the Dergue. A port fee of $12.60 was charged for each ton of donated grain. This replaced coffee as Ethiopia’s biggest hard currency earner. The United States paid $5 million just to have its first 400,000 tons pass customs inspection. It appeared far from coincidental that the costliest-ever government offensive against the Eritrean guerrillas was launched in July 1985, on the heels of the massive influx of relief supplies from the West.

In late 1985, RRC commissioner Dawit defected to the very country he had been the most publicly critical of—the United States. Dawit, who had defended Mengistu to the point of justifying the brutal expulsion of fifty thousand people from a relief camp in Gondar the previous April, lost no opportunity once in the United States to criticize the Ethiopian leader. At an East-West Round Table meeting in New York in late 1986, Dawit said, among other things:

After berating the West for years for not giving enough aid, Dawit was quoted in The Wall Street Journal Europe (April 1986) as stating that the aid kept an inhuman regime in power: “Without this help there would have been a bloody chaos which would have resulted in the removal of Mengistu and his henchmen.”

The Reagan administration’s attitude toward Ethiopia thus had been vindicated by the Marxist government’s top official for dealing with the famine. Rarely in the Third World was the conservative position so authoritatively proven correct. It’s a pity more conservatives weren’t paying attention. Few of them wrote about it. Like the liberals, most conservatives were preoccupied with other issues by the time of Dawit’s defection.

In early 1986, Dawit’s top assistant in the RRC, Berhane Deressa, followed Dawit into exile. Approximately eighty Ethiopian officials had defected by then. In Africa, however, officials flee their own countries all the time, and they never are referred to as “defectors.” The media’s instinctive use of the word for this high-level exodus was perhaps the most eloquent proof of Ethiopia’s transformation into a communist society, a transformation that was completed in the midst of the Western famine relief effort.

Emergency aid meant people, and in late 1984 Ethiopian authorities were forced to allow an influx of Westerners into Addis Ababa—relief workers, government officials, journalists, and celebrities—which in terms of relative size and suddenness was unprecedented in the Eastern bloc. The Hilton Hotel, whose occupancy rate normally hovered around 50 percent, was filled to capacity for the next nine months. An article of faith among many in the Hilton lobby during this period was that the very presence of so many people like themselves from North America, Western Europe, and the rest of the free world would work to moderate the foreign and domestic policies of the regime. Ethiopia, it was said, was being forced by the famine to open itself to Western influence. Seldom have so many people been so wrong in such a naïve fashion about what was going on all around them.

“In fact, it is to Alice in Wonderland that my thoughts recur in seeking some… parallel for life in Addis Ababa,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, in his evocation of 1930s Ethiopia, Remote People. Waugh might have felt a tinge of déjà vu had he been able to pay a return visit a half century later. The nest of restrictions imposed by a totalitarian system, combined with the insidious effects of local history, placed this throng of unknowing intruders from the West in a politically watertight compartment, with distorting mirrors at every turn.

The physical setting of the Ethiopian capital and the manner in which it was built were elements in this deception. Addis Ababa (Amharic for new flower) was built by Menelik II, starting in 1889. As the first Amhara emperor, Menelik wanted to shift the focal point of the empire southward from Tigre to the highlands of Shoa. The site chosen was the plain beside Mount Entoto. But at an altitude of 8,000 feet, the scarcity of wood presented a problem. It was solved in 1900 by the introduction of the fast-growing eucalyptus tree from Australia. As a result, the first sensation a traveler had upon arriving in Addis Ababa was one of bodily well-being, brought about by the invigorating mountain climate and the shade and ubiquitous fragrance of the eucalyptus trees. Diplomats and aid specialists accustomed to the leaden heat and blinding sunlight of other African and Middle Eastern capitals found “Addis” a godsend. It was like arriving at a hill station in the Himalayas after weeks on the hot, teeming plains of the subcontinent. Gone was the irritability stirred by dusty, clammy skin and a shirt drenched with sweat at ten in the morning. One’s mood was vastly improved and thus made a person better disposed toward his or her hosts.

The real hosts in “Addis” went unseen. Addis Ababa was conceived by Menelik as an Amhara fortress, and its most striking architectural detail is its walls, whether of stone, mudbrick, wattle, or corrugated iron. High walls of stone block off the sprawling grounds of the palace from public view, and few members of the Western community ever were allowed to see beyond these walls. Mengistu and the rest of the eleven-person Politburo met rarely with resident nationals of countries outside the Third World or Eastern bloc. Only for Kurt Jansson, a native of neutral Finland and the U.N. assistant secretary general for emergency operations in Ethiopia, was an exception made. (Mengistu was especially shrewd about whom he chose to receive among the temporary visitors from the United States. As I mentioned, he never agreed to meet with USAID administrator McPherson, who was directing the delivery of one-third of all the emergency assistance reaching Ethiopia from the outside world. But the Ethiopian leader did meet with liberal Democratic congressman Howard Wolpe—by Washington standards an apologist for the regime—and with singer Harry Belafonte, whose twenty-minute meeting with Mengistu in June 1985 was partly taken up by a discussion about human rights violations in South Africa.

The policies of the Dergue were invisible, too. Visits to resettlement and villagization sites, with the exception of showcase camps, were prohibited. The chilling reports of large-scale human rights abuses usually filtered into “Addis” by way of refugee stories from Sudan and therefore were treated with deep suspicion; the product merely, it was thought, of exaggerations and interviews with refugees conducted through biased translators sympathetic to the Tigrean guerrillas. Like the regime, many nongovernmental Western aid people in Addis Ababa saw the Tigrean and Eritrean guerrillas as “bandits” who were largely to blame for the regime’s failure to get more food to the countryside. The aid community had few ways of knowing that the guerrillas in the north were among the most sophisticated insurgents in the world, enjoying mass popular support, and that the regime often was bombing the places it professed to be feeding. There never were any reports in the official media about the fighting. Many relief officials had no interest in finding out. The vacuum of official information in Addis Ababa, as in other Eastern bloc capitals, was sufficiently formidable for rumors to be far more prevalent than facts about such issues as resettlement, villagization, and the war in the north. In fact, the difference in perceptions between the foreign community in Addis Ababa and the one in Khartoum (which functioned as a rear base for the guerrillas) was almost as profound as that between the foreign communities in Tel Aviv and Damascus.

There were, in fact, two Ethiopias—the one inside the water-tight compartment and the one outside. Outside was the war, the Dergue, its East German–advised security service, the thousands of political detainees, and the drive toward collectivization. This world—the world inhabited by Mrs. Ahmed and the Oromos of Hararghe, whose troubles began about the same time that Westerners began pouring into Addis Ababa—constituted a reality that was somewhat vague, suspect, and threatening to the foreigners who didn’t want to be ejected all at the same time. It was best not to bring this world any closer by provoking it. In Sudan, the famine-wracked country next door, openly discussing the evil qualities of the pro-U.S. government of Jaafar Nimeiri was one thing, but in Ethiopia, where the evil was of an entirely different magnitude, it was quite another. Criticism of Mengistu by Westerners in Addis Ababa was muted. When a French relief group, Medicins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), was thrown out of Ethiopia for unreservedly criticizing the resettlement program, the Western community of Addis Ababa did not come to the group’s defense. Everyone appeared to run for cover.

After all, the world inside the compartment—the world of Dawit, the RRC, and RRC-approved day trips to emergency feeding centers—contradicted much of what was outside and much of what Medicins sans Frontieres was saying. The RRC might have been bureaucratic, as everything in Ethiopia traditionally was, but it was not corrupt. With persistence, the bureaucracy could be circumvented, couldn’t it? Was there a more dedicated and efficient African relief organization than the RRC? Didn’t the very efficiency of the RRC testify to the positive qualities of the Dergue and to the Dergue’s commitment to the relief effort? Wouldn’t more Western support for the RRC improve Dawit’s bargaining position inside the palace? Wasn’t this the very way in which to draw Ethiopia toward the West?

It was true; the RRC was not corrupt. Grain shipments very likely were misappropriated in Ethiopia by the government for strategic reasons, but little of the grain was pilfered for personal gain. Mengistu, his other faults notwithstanding, did not tolerate the level of thievery common to countries such as Zaire and Nigeria. As I’ve suggested, were he more corrupt, less people might have been murdered and tortured. As to the bureaucracy, it certainly could be managed, but that depended upon who you were. U.S. Embassy officials and others likely to ask critical questions always seemed to have difficulty getting permission to travel outside the capital. General Julius Becton, Jr., director of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, told Newsweek (June 3, 1985), “[Ethiopian] officials knew I was going to be there 30 days in advance. But the night before I was supposed to depart I was told, ‘We don’t have your travel permits.’”

Admittedly, the efficiency of the RRC was impressive. But this was not due to any humanitarian commitment on the Dergue’s part. In Ethiopia, administrative finesse was not exclusive to the RRC. Ethiopian Airlines was the best-run national carrier in black Africa; the airline’s record of punctuality was as good as many airlines in the West. The guerrilla-affiliated relief agencies in Tigre and Eritrea were just as effective as the RRC and quite a bit more resourceful considering the more difficult conditions under which they had to work. Just consider: could the government of any other sub-Saharan country—after announcing an intention to collectivize several million people—actually be able to do it, however crudely? Ethiopia’s hunger and poverty may have been typically African, but the causes weren’t. The under-development of the northern provinces could not be blamed on ignorance and incompetence. Efficiency was a national trait, and while one branch of the bureaucracy was effectively working to save lives, others were operating just as effectively in a different direction.

Rather than draw Ethiopia toward the West, as many in the Western community in Addis Ababa predicted, the relief effort coincided with a further radicalization of the Dergue. At the beginning of 1985, when the Hilton was literally bursting with Western visitors, four Marxist ideologues—Alemu Abebe, Shewandagan Belete, Shimelis Mazengia, and Fassika Sidelel—nicknamed the Gang of Four, emerged as Mengistu’s top advisers. On February 9, an austerity program was announced that was aimed at further decimating the urban middle class. Also, government employees earning more than $250 per month were from then on required to wear North Korean–style tunics in place of Western suits; this was another measure that reinforced Marxist aesthetics. In April, at a meeting of the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, Mengistu praised the Soviet Union and condemned “American imperialism” but made no mention of the massive Western relief effort. In May, the pace of forced collectivization increased. Meanwhile, Dawit and his associates, having succeeded at bringing the famine under control, were becoming more and more isolated. Anyone with any political street-smarts could have predicted Dawit’s demise. If there really had been an opportunity for a basically pragmatic, Western-oriented official such as Dawit to increase his influence inside the palace, the regime would have had a different personality than it did.

The truth was that many in the Western community in the Ethiopian capital, who served as the West’s eyes and ears during the famine and provided the media with much of their information, did not want to admit the truth. Whatever nightmares the word “Ethiopia” may have conjured up in the United States, “Addis” was a nice place to be. (The same could not be said about capitals elsewhere in Africa, where the suffering in the countryside was far less.) The mountain climate was only partly responsible for the pleasant ambiance. As the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity, the Ethiopian capital was relatively clean, with good roads, a plethora of new public buildings, and well-manicured parks. The Hilton Hotel was one of the best-managed, centrally located Hiltons in the world; the Hilton’s heated, outdoor swimming pool served as a magnet for the foreign community on weekend afternoons.

As for the food, millions may have been starving in the adjacent countryside, but for foreigners, “Addis” was one of the better places on the continent to eat: a well-prepared charcoal-broiled steak, Nile perch, and Italian and Chinese cuisines always were available. Not only was the Hilton equipped with several fine restaurants, but around the city there were several more. No nearby, heartrending scenes spoiled the repasts; just as walls of stone blocked off the sinister reality of the Dergue, walls of corrugated iron blocked off the equally unpleasant reality of the slums. Nor were there many beggars in Addis Ababa; far less than in Egypt, for example, where nobody was starving. Christopher J. Matthews, in his article in The New Republic (January 21, 1985), made one of the most insightful observations ever about Ethiopia’s capital: “In a country where millions were starving, there was no sign of anyone begging or hustling to survive. I began to wonder. The price of coming into town must be higher than the price of staying away. If the price of staying away in the barren, dying parts of the country is near-certain death, the price of coming into the city must be even more terrible, even more certain.”

Matthews, perhaps without being aware of it, had stumbled close to the central fact of 1980s Ethiopia, a fact that many foreigners who actually lived there and many of the journalists who interpreted the famine for the public failed utterly to grasp— Ethiopia, in the manner of Syria and Iraq, was a modernizing and controlled, praetorian police state, with a single tribe or ethnic group on top, supported by the most brutal and sophisticated means of repression. For the officers in charge, preserving the integrity of the empire against rebels was a far more uplifting and important goal than fighting a famine was. The Soviets, the only great imperialists of the nineteenth century to have survived the twentieth, understood this. They helped, through massive arms shipments, the Dergue achieve its more important goal; the United States helped in the less important one.

As Matthews perceived, like the walls around the palace and around the slums, there was a wall around the famine, too. Destitute peasants were rounded up and arrested even before reaching the city limits. While Eritreans, Tigreans, and others in the northern provinces died by the hundreds of thousands, the markets of the Amhara fortress of Addis Ababa were brimming with grain. The price of it may have risen dramatically, but at least it was there. In Asmara, too, the government-held, fortified provincial capital of Eritrea, food was abundant because it was strategically necessary for the regime to keep the local population pacified. According to a confidential report by a Western relief agency, the “dedicated and efficient” RRC was virtually starving the worst famine regions in Wollo, while at the same time pouring food into embattled, militarily vital areas of Tigre and Eritrea and stockpiling it outside Addis Ababa. (Although in the first six months of 1985, Ethiopia got, more or less, all of the 750,000 tons of grain it required for that period through foreign donations, in Wollo the RRC distributed only about one-quarter of the grain allocated to that area.)

The sanitized reality of the Ethiopian capital, a condition that only the most chillingly brutal of regimes could create, helped make the place especially attractive for its foreign residents. “Addis” was a plum posting for a relief official. The situation in the country was “absolutely horrifying” and thus “in the news,” which translated into prestige and career advancement for those on the scene. Few seemed to want to rock the boat when rocking the boat could get you thrown out. In the Hilton lobby, it was easier to criticize the Reagan administration than it was to criticize the Dergue.

In 1921, the nascent Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union was shaken by a great famine that its own ruthless policy of crop requisition had caused. Foreign aid was essential, and the U.S. people proved to be the most generous. Herbert Hoover, who seven years later would be elected president of the United States, spearheaded an effort that put food in the mouths of more than 12 million peasants. The regime survived to inflict an even greater famine in the following decade.

But in Ethiopia and in the United States, nobody paid attention to this legacy. In the February 7, 1985, report on the famine, issued by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Policy and arising out of Senator Kennedy’s Christmas 1984 visit to the emergency feeding camps, six previous famines were listed in a table entitled, “Famine in Modern History.” The famines in the Ukraine, which were the largest of all, were not included in the list.

The mid 1980s Western relief effort in Ethiopia, like the one more than sixty years earlier in the Soviet Union, was idealistically conceived and succeeded at saving, for the time being, an uncountable number of lives. To some extent, turning the other cheek in the face of an ugly reality was necessary to achieve this. (One also could argue the opposite.) However, it is undeniable that the latter effort was far more critical to the survival of Mengistu than was Hoover’s to the survival of Lenin and Stalin. If we are to believe Dawit after his defection, the effort was absolutely crucial to the continued existence of what today has become the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, whose future, foodwise, appears even bleaker than its past.

The problem with the policy based solely on relief was that it ignored so much else of the drama in Ethiopia. What was ignored, although less visually stirring, was more central to Ethiopia’s future. But U.S. attention was kept focused on a thin and exposed stratum of reality.

Although there was one famine in Ethiopia, its estimated eight to ten million victims were divided up, in terms of responsibility, among three major armies and other minor ones in the warring north of Ethiopia. Outside of the main towns, most of Eritrea and Tigre were in the hands of antigovernment guerrillas: the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), each with its own famine relief organization whose declared purpose was the same as the RRC’s. With troops constantly on the move, and mass migrations of peasants in progress, it often was impossible to know exactly how many starving people were in the territory of any one army at any particular time. As few as one-third, or as many as two-thirds, of those starving could have been in areas held by the EPLF and the TPLF on a given day. A common assumption was that almost half of the eight to ten million affected peasants were in territory reached only by guerrilla relief agencies. For journalists, this meant that the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa was a useful base for covering one side of the famine only. The base for covering the other side was Khartoum and the squalid Sudanese settlements near the border with Eritrea and Tigre.

Organizing transport and travel permits for a trip to the part of Tigre province controlled by the Ethiopian government took one to three days. During this period, the journalist resided at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa. From there, it was a fifteen-minute drive to the airport, where the British Royal Air Force could get a reporter up to the emergency feeding camps at Makelle, in the heart of Tigre, the same morning on one of the air force’s relief flights. Having seen the RRC operation at Makelle, in February 1986, I wanted to see how the RRC’s rival, the TPLF guerrilla-affiliated Relief Society of Tigre (REST) dealt with hungry peasants in its zone. But getting into the part of Tigre controlled by the TPLF was much more difficult.

The TPLF was recognized by no one in the international community (the weapons the TPLF fought with were captured from the Dergue). Unlike Eritrea, which bordered on the Red Sea, Tigre was a landlocked province that throughout history had little or no contact with the outside world. REST had far fewer resources in terms of money and educated staff than had the RRC. The RRC, headquartered in an internationally recognized capital and run by people like Dawit who had attended university in the United States, was at least somewhat acquainted with the demands of visiting foreigners whose time in the country was limited. REST was even less so. Moreover, REST was at the mercy of the Sudanese authorities, who were far less efficient than their Ethiopian counterparts.

As with the RRC, it usually took one to three days for REST to arrange a field visit for a journalist. But instead of the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa, a journalist had to wait at the REST guesthouse in Gedaref, a refugee center in the wastes of eastern Sudan, several hours by bus from Khartoum.

The guesthouse was a small compound on a garbage-strewn street crowded with beggars and all types of vehicles whose drivers never stopped beeping their horns. The baking sunlight, the absence of shade, and the deafening cacophony kept most journalists inside the enclosure, where I waited three days with a British colleague for a truck convoy into TPLF territory. While we waited, we sat in uncomfortable chairs, staring at windows boarded up against the desert sun. Unboiled, unfiltered lemonade was brought in an old plastic pitcher every few hours and placed on a broken metal table covered with an oilcloth. The overhead fan didn’t work, and the room was ridden with flies. There was no running water, and the toilet facilities were unspeakable. Coarse blankets were provided for sleeping out in the courtyard. As it was late February, there were thankfully few mosquitoes, and therefore the risk of contracting malaria was slight.

After the first day, no more meals were provided at the guest-house. REST, which was strapped for funds much more than was the RRC, had a rule that thereafter visiting journalists and aid workers had to fend for themselves. As no restaurant in town served even reasonably edible food by Western standards, we ate in the main market of Gedaref, sipping heavily sugared tea and eating fried bread and grapefruits on a buckled bench amid flies and garbage, with blaring music all around. The third day, a relief worker living in Gedaref took pity on us. He gave us the keys to his house prior to leaving for Khartoum. We took hot showers and raided the kitchen cupboard, which was filled with cans of Heinz soup. The three days at the guesthouse had depleted our reading material, but all we saw on the shelves were a copy of Albert Schweitzer’s Out of My Life and Thought and an old issue of Penthouse. Those few hours passed at the relief worker’s house proved to be the most comfortable of our journey. Once inside the TPLF zone in Tigre, physical conditions were even worse than at the guesthouse.

Nevertheless, the physical discomforts I experienced were bad but not unusual by the standards of Africa-based correspondents. Others suffered worse hardships. Time correspondent James Wilde’s two-week trip along the Zaire River was far more harrowing than mine in Tigre. Gary Strieker of Cable News Network (CNN) and Blaine Harden of The Washington Post went several days without any food at all while traveling in southern Sudan with African rebels who were at war with the Arab government in Khartoum. Yet I recount the details of my stay at the guesthouse in Gedaref because they are central to an understanding of how and why the famine got reported as it did.

Journalism is competitive enough for reporters to willingly suffer the inconveniences that I did if it means getting a story that is going to greatly impress their editors. But most editors in the United States would not have been greatly impressed by the results of a trip into Tigre, where Tigrean Marxists were fighting an Amhara-dominated government that also was Marxist. Tigre held out fascinating insights into the relationship among war, hunger, and ethnic hatred. But visually it often was not exciting. Unlike the situation at the feeding camps on the government side, starving people were not always gathered together in large multitudes. The primary concern of editors was to have their reporters “in there” among starving people as soon as possible and then out again just as quickly to where there were telex and satellite facilities to transmit the story back to the United States. If a reporter could accomplish this task on a day trip by airplane from the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa, why wait in a hovel in eastern Sudan and then ride around in a truck convoy for two weeks in Tigre under awful, illness-producing conditions? With such a comfortable alternative, was this really necessary? People were starving everywhere. Did it matter from which side of the battle lines the famine was covered?

If famine alone were the issue, it wouldn’t have mattered much at all. But the famine was part of something larger and even more important—something that was not merely a story but an unprecedented historical process, which could be better understood from the guerrilla side because the authorities in Addis Ababa had no interest in bringing this process to light.

No other foreign news story of the decade highlighted the media’s role as public servant to the extent that the Ethiopian famine did. Television pictures and news articles brought the pain of starvation into U.S. living rooms, thereby eliciting a flood of relief aid that saved countless lives. But while the technical wizardry of television was able to make the U.S. public feel starvation, the media, by and large, failed to make the public understand it. Even newspapers, which should have been less visually oriented, became fixated with the drama of mass starvation, while the historical and political context in which the famine belonged went largely unexplored. The famine exposed a disturbing trend: television’s increasing ability to control the direction of a story and, by this very power, to intimidate the print media into following television’s lead.

Ethiopia was never really covered; the famine was. Because the effects of Africa’s longest-running war could not be seen well from the government side, the cause of the famine was mainly ascribed to drought. Thus, in the public mind, the famine became another disaster story, like the Mexican earthquake. As public service journalism this was fine. But as straight foreign news coverage—whose purpose was to make the public more sophisticated about a certain area of the world—the U.S. media failed miserably to live up to the standards it had set for itself in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the Third World. Because television footage was required to focus public attention on Ethiopia’s plight, and because television thus set the pace, media coverage in general was both unusually powerful and superficial.

On February 22, 1987, more than a year after Ethiopia had faded from the news, a momentous world event took place that was little written about: Ethiopia formally became a Marxist state, the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, with a Marxist party as the “guiding force.” This was no mere window dressing. Ethiopia, black Africa’s most strategically located and second most populous country, had in almost every conceivable way adopted the Soviet model, the first country on the continent ever to do so. The Coptic Orthodox church had been suppressed and co-opted, in the manner of other orthodox churches in communist states in the Balkans and in the USSR itself. A great mass of peasants had been forcibly collectivized; the Soviet Union had been provided with major military bases; and the wheels of the state machinery, including the party, the security apparatus, and the crucial ministries, had been integrated into the Eastern bloc network. The other African states that were pro-Soviet, Angola and Mozambique, had gone through no such experience, nor even—to such an intense degree—had Nicaragua.

It was a thirteen-year process, beginning with the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. But the revolution that brought a Marxist-inclined regime to power didn’t end until 1978, and only in late 1984, on the eve of the famine emergency, was a communist party, the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia, officially formed. The brief period in 1984 and 1985 during which the U.S. media maintained an intense interest in Ethiopia corresponded with the most critical phase of this operation.

Outside of the Warsaw Pact, only a handful of countries in the world have ever implemented Soviet-style communism. It is a rare, strategically pivotal event anywhere, and in Africa it was unprecedented. In every place where Soviet communism has been instituted, the cost in human suffering has been immense, with famine often the result—whether it be in the Ukraine, Cambodia, or northern Ethiopia. But this was the first time that the U.S. media were there in such force when the conversion to communism actually was taking place. Yet this history was not recorded in the pages of U.S. newspapers to nearly the extent that it should have been.

In the middle and late 1970s, Ethiopia was a big story around the world. Haile Selassie was overthrown, a bloody revolution ensued, the USSR moved in, the United States moved out, Somalia invaded, the province of Tigre rose in revolt, and the guerrilla movement in Eritrea mushroomed overnight. Journalists poured into the region. Eventually, the media tired of the story. Then the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan completely wiped Ethiopia off the world news map. But the fighting in northern Ethiopia continued unabated. Almost every year in the early 1980s, the Addis Ababa government launched a fresh offensive against the guerrillas; two of those offensives were even bigger than the late 1970s offensives the media had covered in force. War was destroying the land and the peasants on it, and the drought and Marxist agricultural policies were only making the situation worse. A famine resulted in 1984, bringing droves of journalists back to Ethiopia for the first time in six years. The famine and the drought were reported in depth. The rest was largely forgotten. The linkage between the headlines in the 1970s and those of the 1980s was never made.

A problem for all the networks was that they couldn’t cover what they couldn’t film. The war was off limits, unless one was willing to enter Ethiopia from a place like Gedaref. Although tens of thousands of people later were reported to have died as a consequence of the Ethiopian government’s resettlement policies, television barely investigated the issue because, with the exception of rare visits to “showcase” camps, cameras were not allowed into the resettlement area. The famine aside, the Ethiopian government probably was responsible for fifty times more deaths of black Africans in the 1984–1985 period than were South African security forces. But the media were much less aggressive toward the regime in Addis Ababa than toward the regime in Pretoria. Another factor was that Mengistu, far more so than South African president P. W. Botha, made himself practically inaccessible to Western television cameras. Botha, with his bluff, ox-like visage bespeaking all the insufferable, uncompromising qualities of the Afrikaner burgher, offered a perfect target for U.S. political cartoonists. But, because the crimes of the Ethiopian regime could not be identified closely enough with any particular face or personality, in the minds of U.S. viewers the evil became abstract and outside the realm of human accountability. In every facet of policy, Mengistu, unlike the embattled South African leader, really was uncompromising; the high stone wall around the palace in Addis Ababa was literal as well as figurative and constituted a barrier too formidable for the media to scale.

As media coverage of the Ethiopian famine wound down in mid 1985, the Ethiopian regime was gearing up for the biggest offensive against the guerrillas since the late 1970s. Battalions of T-54 and T-55 tanks and squadrons of MIG-23 fighter bombers were about to engage in a five-month-long carnage in which thousands of soldiers and civilian peasants would be killed, wounded, and displaced. The billion-dollar infusion of Soviet weaponry, which paralleled the billion-plus infusion of Western relief aid, was about to take effect. Large tracts of guerrilla territory would be mopped up, thereby significantly shifting the battle lines for the first time in years and improving the Soviet position in a strategic corner of the world in the months and weeks prior to the Geneva summit. But the world was to know almost nothing.